On Feb 8, 2019, at 10:04 PM, Harry Jacobson-Beyer <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> Att in old Louisville. I was certainly hoping Google would stick with fiber in Louisville. The local government bent over backward to encourage them: passing an ordinance giving them access to poles and letting them have rights of way by city streets—even trenching their way across. But, of course, Spectrum and AT&T tied them up in court for years, delaying installation. I suspect they were so behind schedule, they gave up. It looks as though the cities they are staying in all have big tech economies. That made Louisville an outlier in the list of cities. I have a friend in Kansas City, one of the first Google fiber cities. He has had Google fiber for years and gets 1 Gb/s both up and down for about $70/month. In my neighborhood, there are wiring conduits buried by every street making it easy for companies to install fiber. Both Spectrum and AT&T pulled fiber through shortly after Google started threatening their duopoly. These fiber runs pass right by my back yard, less than 40 feet from the house. Here are the highest speeds they offer: • AT&T maxes out at 1000 Mb/s down and 1000 Mb/s up for $100/month. ($90/month for the first year.) • Spectrum maxes out at 940 Mb/s down and only 35 Mb/s up for $115/month. (Lots of deals for the first year.) I’ve not made the jump to gigabit speed because I don’t need it—200 Mb/s is comfortable right now. Most Internet services are much slower than 200 Mb/s. For example, you can stream 1080p high-definition at 5 Mb/s. Even 4K video from Netflix or Amazon needs no more than 15-20 Mb/s. L^2 PS/ Many people I talk to about this look at awesome raw speed and forget about latency. For things like Web browsing, latency and DNS lookup time are often more important than raw speed. Latency is what kills satellite broadband, even though its raw speed can be pretty high. Just to show you how important latency can be, a few years ago a consortium of financial companies paid billions for a new fiber run from New York to London just to shave 5 milliseconds off the latency time, not to increase the data transfer rate. There’s a new cable from New York to Chicago for the same reason. ---- Lee Larson [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> I like deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. — Douglas Adams
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